Thanks to the organizers’ fruitful suggestion, this paper explores Copernicus’s reading of Johannes Regiomontanus and Cardinal Bessarion, extending beyond strictly textual matters to the more nebulous question of the two thinkers’ influence on Copernicus. With a few exceptions, the paper is synthetic, summarizing what we know with certainty, but also suggesting what one can reasonably infer,...
My point of departure is Leon Battista Alberti’s (1404-1472) insight into the nature of visual representation. As an Italian humanist and artist, he was aware of the critical power of visual evidence and a rational deliberation of the appearances vis-à-vis the traditional authority of the ancients. Simultaneously he also challenged a subservient approach to the appearances that might turn out...
Around 1518, the Ferrara humanist Celio Calcagnini (1479-1541) wrote an original defense of Earth's motion, Quod caelum stet, terra moveatur vel de perenni motu terrae (The Heavens Stand, the Earth Moves, or the Perennial Motion of the Earth). It was a short but complex philosophical treatise, written in a sophisticated style, on a topic of undoubted interest to the history of cosmology. It is...
According to his disciple Rethicus, Copernicus had been "adiutor & testis observationum doctissimi viri Dominici Mariae", in the years in which he lived and studied in Bologna, at the end of the 15th century. This is Domenico Maria Ploti da Novara, holder of the chair “at Astronomiam” in the Bolognese Studium. A pupil in Ferrara of Giovanni Bianchini and in correspondence with Regiomontanus,...
When Copernicus arrived in Ferrara to obtain a degree in canon law, Ferrara was at the height of its splendor under the guidance of Ercole I d'Este. The year before, Lucrezia Borgia had arrived in Ferrara with a large dowry. But
what attracted Copernicus to Ferrara were not the glories of the Court, but the tradition of astronomical studies that he knew from his acquaintance with Domenico...
Not only Copernicus in Roma! This paper will be on the production of maps in the time of Copernicus. Copernicus was not the first. It starts with Brudzewski (ca. 1445 – ca. 1497) who was the teacher of Wapowski (1475 – 1535) and Copernicus (1473 – 1543) in Kraków. Of course, also Brudzewski relies on earlier ideas, in astronomy as well as in geography. Wapowski and Copernicus become lifelong...
